Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains are known for their speed demons. The moonshiners of old tore over country roads in 1940 Ford coupes, executing 180-degree “bootleg turns” and using bright lights to blind the revenue officers shooting at their tires. Legend has it that many of Nascar’s original drivers cut their teeth here, and modern stock car design is almost certainly indebted to the “liquor cars” dreamed up in local garages, modified for speed and for hauling brimful loads of “that good old mountain dew,” as the country song goes.

From This Story

The Crooked Road winds 300 miles across southwest Virginia. Shown here is the road near Damascus.
(Susana Raab)

Impromptu jam sessions, including a gathering at Floyd, Virginia's Country Store, attract musicians and dancers raised on the raw and keening power of mountain music.
(Susana Raab)

Along the route, backcountry discoveries abound, from local cafés' lighter-than-air biscuits to world-class bluegrass festivals.
(Illustrated map by John S. Dykes)

Traditions are cherished in Floyd. Shown here is the town center.
(Susana Raab)

Folklorist Joe Wilson at the Blue Ridge Music Center near Galax.
(Susana Raab)

Vintage print advertising the Carter Family.
(Susana Raab)

Ralph Stanley (background, left, with musician grandson Nathan, right, and a fan) predicts: "You're going to hear Stanley music many, many years from now."
(Susana Raab)

The region's vocal legacy harks back to hymns performed by rural congregations (shown here is First United Methodist in Independence). "I guess everybody learned in church," says singer Mary Dellenback Hill of Ararat. "None of us had lessons."
(Susana Raab)

"You'll see some real ankle biters playing the heck out of the fiddle," Wilson promised the author about Youth Night at a mountain music showdown.
(Susana Raab)

Any worry that young people were losing interest in old-time tunes has long since been laid to rest.
(Susana Raab)

Fiddler Howard Mannon's set list for a Floyd jamboree.
(Susana Raab)

Today the “old-time” Virginia music – the forerunner of American country – is still performed at Dairy Queens, community centers, coon hunting clubs barber shops and other locations like the Floyd Country Store.
(Susana Raab)

Some of the oldest, loveliest songs are known as “crooked tunes,” for their irregular measures; they lead the listener in unexpected directions, and give the music trail its name.
(Susana Raab)

The 100-year-old Floyd Country Store sill sells bib overalls, but now it also carries eco-conscious cocktail napkins.
(Susana Raab)

Some consider the Carter Family Fold, a cavernous tobacco barn in Hiltons, Virginia, to be the greatest country music venue of all.
(Susana Raab)

Admission to the Fold is still 50 cents for kids and the standard fare remains classic barbecue pork on a bun with a side of corn muffins.
(Susana Raab)

Bands on the stage play Carter standards, such as “Wildwood Flower” and lesser-known numbers.
(Susana Raab)

Trammel is one of the many small coal-mining towns that dot the Crooked Road, Virginia’s heritage music trail.
(Susana Raab)

Ralph Stanley donated many artifacts from his collection to fill the Clintwood, Virginia museum that takes his name.
(Susana Raab)

The Willis Gap community center in Ararat, Virginia plays host to a jam session for dozens of musicians.
(Susana Raab)

At Willis Gap, each musician selects a favorite tune for the group to play: old-time, gospel or bluegrass.
(Susana Raab)

Around The Web

Related Content

Even now, it is tempting to barrel down Shooting Creek Road, near Floyd, Virginia, the most treacherous racing stretch of all, where the remains of old stills decay beside a rushing stream. But instead I proceed at a snail’s pace, windows down, listening to the burble of the creek, the gossip of cicadas in the dense summer woods, and the slosh of a Mason jar full of bona fide moonshine in the back seat—a gift from one of the new friends I met along the road.

Slow is almost always better in this part of the world, I was learning. A traveler should be sure to leave time to savor another ready-to-levitate biscuit or a melting sunset or a stranger’s drawling tale—and especially, to linger at the mountain banjo-and-fiddle jams that the region is known for. This music cannot be heard with half an ear—it has 400 years of history behind it, and listening to it properly takes time.

The Crooked Road, Virginia’s heritage music trail, winds for some 300 miles through the southwest corner of the state, from the Blue Ridge into deeper Appalachia, home to some of the rawest and most arresting sounds around. Most of the trail runs along U.S. 58, a straightforward multilane highway in some spots and a harrowing slalom course in others. But the Crooked Road—a state designation originally conceived in 2003—is shaped by several much older routes. Woodland buffalo and the Indians who hunted them wore the first paths in this part of the world. Then, in the 1700s, settlers came in search of new homes in the South, following the Great Wagon Road from Germantown, Pennsylvania, to Augusta, Georgia. Other pioneers headed west on the Wilderness Road that Daniel Boone hacked through the mountains of Kentucky. Some rode on wagons, but many walked—one woman told me the story of her great-grandfather, who as a child hiked with his parents into western Virginia with the family pewter tied in a sack around his waist and his chair on his back. And, of course, some fled into the mountains, long a refuge for escaped slaves.

The diversity of settlers funneled into the region gave rise to its unique musical style. Today the “old-time” Virginia music—the forerunner of American country—is still performed not just at legendary venues such as the Carter Family Fold near Hiltons, Virginia, but at Dairy Queens, community centers, coon hunting clubs, barber shops, local rescue squads and VFW halls. A fiddle tune may be played three different ways in one county; the sound is markedly modified as you travel deeper into the mountains toward the coalfields. Some of the oldest, loveliest songs are known as “crooked tunes,” for their irregular measures; they lead the listener in unexpected directions, and give the music trail its name.

Except for a few sites, including a park near the town of Rocky Mount, where a surviving fragment of the Great Wagon Road wanders off into shadow, the older pathways have virtually disappeared. But the music’s journey continues, slowly.

Cheick Hamala Diabate smiled angelically at the small, bewildered crowd gathered in a breezeway at the Blue Ridge Music Center near Galax, Virginia. They had come expecting to hear Mid-Day Mountain Music with local guitar players, but here instead was a beaming African musician in pointy-toed boots and dark sunglasses, cradling an alien string instrument called a ngoni. Small and oblong, it is made of goatskin stretched over hollowed wood. “Old in form but very sophisticated,” whispered folklorist Joe Wilson, a co-founder of the center, a partnership between the National Park Service and the National Council for the Traditional Arts. “Looks like it wouldn’t have much music in it, but the music’s in his hands.”

Wilson is one of the Crooked Road’s creators and the author of the indispensable Guide to the Crooked Road. He had invited Diabate for a recording session, not only because the musician is a virtuoso performer nominated for a Grammy, but because the ngoni is an ancient ancestor of the banjo, often described as the most American of instruments. The ngoni’s shortened drone string, tied off with a piece of rawhide, is the giveaway—it’s a predecessor of the modern banjo’s signature abbreviated fifth string.

“This is a tune to bless people—very, very important,” Diabate told the audience as he strummed the ngoni. Later he would perform a tune on the banjo, an instrument he’d never heard of before immigrating to this country from Mali 15 years ago but has since embraced like a long-lost relative.

Captured Africans were being shipped to coastal Virginia as early as 1619; by 1710, slaves constituted one-quarter of the colony’s population. They brought sophisticated musical and instrument-building skills across the Atlantic and, in some cases, actual instruments—one banjo-like device from a slave ship still survives in a Dutch museum. Slaves performed for themselves (a late 1700s American folk painting, The Old Plantation, depicts a black musician plucking a gourd banjo) and also at dances for whites, where, it was quickly discovered, “the banjar”—as Thomas Jefferson called his slaves’ version—was much more fun to groove to than the tabor or the harp. Constantly altered in shape and construction, banjos were frequently paired with a European import, the fiddle, and the unlikely duo became country music’s bedrock.

About Abigail Tucker

We Recommend

Have you ever wondered how a simple shot can keep you from dying a horrible death? In this one-minute video, Ask Smithsonian’s host, Eric Schulze, unravels how vaccines boot-camp our bodies into shape, getting us ready to fight off deadly diseases